Isaiah Bailey as The Phantom in Phantom of the Opera North American Tour, coming to the Music Hall Dec. 2-13 as part of the American Theatre Guild Kansas City’s annual PNC Broadway in Kansas City series (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
A season filled with dramas, comedies, musicals, classics and newly minted works for the stage
We’ll begin with Kansas City Repertory Theatre, which will present a four-show season of plays and musicals (as well as its annual holiday production of A Christmas Carol). The good news: With the exception of the Charles Dickens classic, each show will be new to the Rep audience.
(No official word at press time on a possible new physical home for the Rep, whose longtime residency at UMKC will expire in June, 2029.)
at KCRep. (KCRep)
The season opens with the Tony Award-winning musical Come From Away by Irene Sankoff and David Hein. The production, which coincides with the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, offers a poignant, comic and healing depiction of how the most deadly act of terrorism in U.S. history affected a specific group of people — crews and passengers on airliners that were diverted to the small Canadian town of Gander in Newfoundland, where residents and passengers got to know each other in extraordinary circumstances.
Stuart Carden, the Rep’s artistic director, will stage the show Sept. 1-20 at the Spencer Theatre on UMKC campus. (The national tour played the Music Hall in 2020; you can read the KC Studio review at kcstudio.org/serious-musical-rooted-history-packs-punch-met/).
“I feel a real responsibility to tell this story on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the response of the people in Gander, Newfoundland, having their population increased by 7,000,” Carden said. “Our first week of performances aligns with when all these international folks were in Gander 25 years ago.”
Carden said the show will serve “both as an act of living history and a remembrance of those who lived through the attacks on 9/11 and our collective response to that. But now we’re recognizing that there’s a whole generation of people, young folk, who only have a connection to 9/11 through news stories and footage online.”
The show’s writers used direct interviews with many of the people who were thrown together in Gander.
“I think there’s incredible power to telling the story of this community that didn’t let fear stand in the way of their generosity,” he said. “I think that has universal resonance and a particular resonance right now in our very divided social and political climate.”
Carden pointed to a couple of unique aspects of the Rep production.
“Our approach will very much be with local Kansas City artists,” he said. “Just a couple of roles will come from out of town. The majority of the cast will be local, including local musicians. We think it’s important that this show about community be populated with people from our community.”
The rest of the season:
John Proctor is the Villain, by Kimberly Belflower, Oct. 6-25, at Copaken Stage, the Rep’s downtown venue at 13th and Walnut in the Power & Light District.
Carden called Belflower’s piece “one of the most exciting plays written in the last 10 years.”
Carden said the play was “explosive, timely, funny and just a great piece of writing. Young audiences in particular are going to be thrilled by this production. It’s a kind of generational response to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.”
Laura Alcalá Baker, who earlier this year staged One of the Good Ones at the Rep, returns to direct.
“This play really resonates with all audiences, and particularly young women,” Carden said.
A Christmas Carol, the Rep’s long-running holiday show based on the Charles Dickens novel, runs Nov. 21-Dec. 24 at the Spencer Theatre.
The adaptation is by Carden and associate artistic director Jason Chanos. Chanos will stage the production. The visually spectacular, music-filled show has always been a box-office hit. This year, veteran actor Mark Robbins steps into the role of Scrooge, following Gary Neal Johnson’s retirement. Robbins, one of the city’s finest classically trained performers, has appeared in various roles in the show for decades. (See our “Break a Leg,” page 24)
Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, based on the life of the civil rights icon, runs Feb. 16-March 7, 2027, at Copaken Stage.
Hamer grew up the daughter of a Southern sharecropper and went on to found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and become an outspoken champion of civil rights. The play is by Cheryl L. West (The Watsons Go to Birmingham, Jar the Floor, Pullman Porter Blues) and will be directed by KC Rep associate artistic director Morgana Wilborn.
Carden said Fannie Lou Hamer’s story “is both historically important and urgently relevant. The play brings her to life not as a distant icon, but as a warm, funny, deeply human organizer, truth-teller, and leader. The audience experience will be intimate, direct and music-filled. It should feel more like a gathering than a conventional biography.”
The Play That Goes Wrong runs May 4-23, 2027, at the Spencer. The British stage comedy by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields became a major hit in London and New York (including Broadway and off-Broadway productions). The show depicts a series of disasters as a small theater company performs an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery. Actors stumble and fall and forget their lines, props fail, doors stick, and the set teeters on the brink of collapse. Stuart Carden directs. He called it “a brilliantly constructed physical comedy about a theater company trying to perform a murder mystery while everything falls apart.”
Contact: kcrep.org/816-235-2700.
The Rep isn’t the only theater company staging shows new to local audiences. That’s exactly what Ernie Nolan, the Unicorn Theatre’s artistic director, is doing. But here’s the thing. The shows will not only be new to local audiences — they’re new to him. Nolan has assembled a 2026-27 season of shows he has never seen. He did see the movie version of Terrence McNally’s 1975 comedy The Ritz, which opened the Unicorn season in August. Every other title belongs to a show that Nolan had read but never seen. How other directors might have chosen to stage the material was of less interest to Nolan than how the shows aligned with his taste and theatrical imagination.
“It’s a clean slate,” Nolan said. “They are all plays I read and loved and by playwrights I admired. All of them jumped off the page. I haven’t seen any of them. And I’m directing three. For me that’s part of the fun of it. Sometimes you see something and it gets stuck in your head, but I don’t want to recreate something someone else has done. I love it when I’m able to figure something out with a collaborative team — solve the mystery of the play, if you will.”
The Unicorn season continues with Red Like Fruit, by Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch, Oct. 14-25.
The two-character drama received its world premiere in 2024 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and subsequently was produced in Toronto, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland and in Catskill, New York. The plays depicts a journalist named Lauren who has written an account of a sexual assault, which forces her to reflect on her own history as an assault victim. While Lauren is onstage throughout, her story is read aloud by Luke, whose objective reading is acted out by the largely silent Lauren. The material raises questions about gender and sexual violence. Nolan said he had followed the play’s history and knew it was the kind of material he wanted to do.
The rest of the Unicorn season:
Sherlock Holmes and The Adventure of the Elusive Ear, by David MacGregor, Nov. 11-29. Technically, this is a comedic Sherlock Holmes play that began life as a novel by MacGregor, who then adapted it for the stage. The story follows an investigation by Holmes, Dr. Watson and former opera singer Irene Adler (who appears in only one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories) as they team up to find a destitute Vincent van Gogh’s missing ear.
Anti-Hero: Revenge of the Swifties, by Derick Edgren Otero, Dec. 9-27.
The play depicts maniacal fans of songwriter and pop icon Taylor Swift (and now spouse of Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce). The show premiered in 2024 at the New Play Festival at the University of Iowa Department of Theatre Arts. The playwright said at the time that inspiration “comes from everywhere because Taylor Swift is everywhere. I got inspiration from being on my phone, going on Twitter, and watching people talk about her albums.”
The playwright also said he assumed Swift was at the peak of her popularity when he began writing the play. “That obviously wasn’t true,” he said. “Now she’s 10 times as famous.”
Job, by Max Wolf Friedlich, Feb. 3-14, 2027. This two-hander, described by the Unicorn as a psychological thriller, depicts a woman’s session with an older male crisis therapist after she has been put on leave from her job following the release of a viral video on social media.
Primary Trust, by Eboni Booth, March 3-14, 2027. Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, Booth’s play depicts the upending of a longtime bookstore employee, an African-American man named Kenneth, after he loses his job. Described as a play about new beginnings, the show invites the audience to watch as Kenneth tries to ground his altered life with the help of an imaginary friend.
Suffs, a musical by Shaina Taub, June 2-20, 2027. This Tony Award-winner offers a look at the suffragists who fought for a woman’s right to vote — and how their political struggle brought some of them together but also destroyed friendships. (Taub played the central character, Alice Paul, who was, among other things, a late 19th-/early 20th-century suffragist, feminist and women’s rights activist. By so doing, Paul followed the examples set by her Quaker parents, who believed in gender equality.)
Contact: unicorntheatre.org/816-531-7529.
Meanwhile, just down the street from the Unicorn, the Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre — housed in the historic Warwick Theatre at 3927 Main Street — has prepared a daunting season plus two special productions. Officially, the season began in August with a production of The Shark is Broken, by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon, whose three-character piece is set against a unique backdrop: the making of the classic movie “Jaws.” (Shaw is the son of actor Robert Shaw.)
Now it’s on to Tony Kushner’s iconic Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches, Oct. 16-25. Kushner’s so-called AIDS epic made history with its audacity, boldness, eloquence, humor and pointed political commentary about the AIDS crisis during the Reagan-Bush years. The monumental two-part play has been staged in Kansas City twice before — first by the Unicorn and later by Kansas City Rep.
Karen Paisley, the MET’s artistic director and co-founder, said the play carries a unique resonance a generation since it opened on Broadway in 1993.
“It’s interesting to be approaching that work with a cast who are in their early to late 20s now,” Paisley said. “I was thinking about this play this morning and I was thinking, ‘This is awfully big, isn’t it?’ This is one of the biggest things we’ve done at the Warwick, and it’s a lot. It’s epic in its scale and it’s epic in its topic.”
But Paisley has never shied away from anything too big. To date, the MET is the only local theater to have staged The Kentucky Cycle, Robert Schenkkan’s nine one-act plays depicting the violence, greed and broken families connected to a single piece of ground, starting in the early 19th century.
At the time of this interview, Angels had not been cast — with one exception. Andy Penn, a veteran of several memorable MET productions, will play Kushner’s fictionalized version of notorious red-baiting New York attorney Roy Cohn.
The rest of the shows:
A Civil War Christmas — An American Musical Celebration, by Paula Vogel, Dec. 10-20, at the Alexander Majors Barn, 8201 State Line Road. Paisley pointed out that the venue — a popular site for weddings — is not a theater, so seating will be limited. That will also pose challenges for the director, because the show calls for a big cast and at least two musicians. Among the characters: Abe Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, the assassin John Wilkes Booth and an enslaved woman desperately running to freedom with her young daughter. This production is not part of the regular season. “The MET has a history of doing theater in found space,” Paisley said.
Man of La Mancha, Jan. 29-Feb. 7, 2027 at the Warwick. This show, also, is not included in the season. But it’s a classic musical based on Don Quixote and Paisley has wanted to do it for years.
Angels in America: Part Two — Perestroika, March 12-28, 2027. Paisley said the schedule would be structured in a way that would allow some theatergoers to see both parts of Angels within a short time span.
The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years by Pearl Cleage, April 30-May 9. 2027. Cleage’s writing often examines the underlying issues of sexism and racism, especially among African-American women. Set in 1964 in Montgomery, Alabama, just 10 years after the city’s historic bus boycott, Cleage’s comedy depicts an historic celebration within the city’s African-American elite — the so-called “colored aristocracy.” According to broadwayworld.com, the play is a “pitch perfect comedy” that explores themes of “class, privilege, generational wealth and family betrayal.”
More info: metkc.org/816-569-3226.
The American Theatre Guild
Kansas City has put together a 2026-27 season for its annual PNC Broadway in Kansas City series that includes newer Broadway musicals and tried-and-true audience favorites.
The lineup kicks off with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s singular Phantom of the Opera making a return trip to Kansas City Dec. 2-13, at the Music Hall, 301 W. 13th St. A show that needs no introduction, Webber’s record-breaking musical based on Gaston Leroux’s novel ran for decades in London and New York.
The rest of the season:
The Bodyguard – The Musical, based on the 1992 film starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner, Jan. 5-10, 2027, at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, 1601 Broadway. The show has been described as a jukebox musical that includes songs from the film as well as other Whitney Houston hits.
The Outsiders, based on S.E. Hinton’s young-readers novel as well as Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation, Feb. 16-20, 2027 at the Music Hall. The 2023 production claimed four Tony Awards, including Best Musical. The show features music and lyrics by Justin Levine, Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance and a book by Levine and Adam Rapp.
BOOP! The Musical, March 2-7, 2027, at the Kauffman Center. The show is derived from the iconic cartoon character who appeared in 90 animated shorts by the Fleischer Studios in the 1930s. The show features music by David Foster and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead. Bob Martin (The Drowsy Chaperone) wrote the book.
Water for Elephants, March 30-April 4, 2027, the Kauffman Center. The show features music by the PigPen Theatre Co. and a book by Rick Elice. Based on Sara Gruen’s 2006 novel (which was adapted for a 2011 movie), the show depicts a day in the life of an elderly man who resides in an assisted-living home and decides to visit a touring one-ring circus for a day. Director Jessica Stone won a Tony Award for her staging of the 2024 Broadway production.
Buena Vista Social Club, May 11-16, 2027, the Music Hall. The show is set in Havana and invites the audience on a musical journey from the 1950s through the 1990s as it depicts the lives of four musicians and the impact of living under the Fidel Castro regime. The show opened off-Broadway in 2023 and moved to Broadway in 2025.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, July 13-18, 2027, the Music Hall. This play (not a musical) by Jack Thorne enjoyed long runs in London and New York and collected numerous awards. The show became a hit in part because of its reliance on magic-show illusions.
In addition to the regular season, the Guild will also present SIX, a musical about the six wives of King Henry VIII told from a decidedly modern perspective. The show runs Jan. 26-31 at the Music Hall.
More info: www.americantheatreguild.com/kansas-city/816-421-7500.
Music Theater Heritage, the multi-venue company at Crown Center, is still basking in the glow of its innovative musical adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. But in July it unveiled its 25th anniversary season, a mix of classic and contemporary musicals as well as revues celebrating the work of iconic jazz and pop artists.
The season:
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, a Tony Award-winning show by composer/lyricist William Finn and book-writer Rachel Sheinkin, Feb. 11-28, 2027, on the MTH Main Stage (located on the third level of Crown Center).
Once On This Island, a Caribbean-flavored Tony-winning modern classic, with music by Stephen Flaherty and a book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, April 1-18, 2027 on the Main Stage.
Damn Yankees, with music and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross and a book by George Abbott and Douglass Wallop, June 3-20, 2027 in the MTH Grand Theater (former home of the American Heartland Theatre.) Based on Wallop’s novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, the show depicts an aging baseball fan who makes a deal with the Devil to be young again and a star ball player. As the MTH press release suggests, the theater will be a short walk to Washington Park — the site of the proposed Royals downtown stadium.
The Light in the Piazza, a winner of six Tony Awards, features music and lyrics by Adam Guettel and a book by Craig Lucas. Based on a 1960 novella by Elizabeth Spencer, which in turn was the basis of a 1962 film, the show is a bittersweet 1950s romance about a mother, her mentally disabled daughter and an Italian man they meet while vacationing in Florence. According to MTH, the show is rarely produced “due to its extraordinary vocal and musical demands.” The show will run for six performances, July 7-11, 2027, in the MTH Grand Theater (former home of the American Heartland Theatre.)
The main season concludes with a Kansas City premiere: Dead Outlaw, with music and lyrics by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna and a book by Itamar Moses. The Broadway hit is based on the life of Elmer McCurdy, a real-life (and amazingly inept) Old West outlaw whose afterlife consisted of people paying to see his touring embalmed corpse after he was killed by a posse. The show will be performed on the Main Stage Oct. 7-31, 2027.
In addition, MTH will in 2027 offer a series of musical tributes in the company’s Ruby Room: Lady Day: The Music of Billie Holiday, Jan. 20-24; Thriller: The Music of Michael Jackson, May 5-16; and Yacht Rock: Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, & Toto, July 21-Aug. 1.
More info: www.musictheaterheritage.com/816-221-6987.
The New Theatre & Restaurant, 9229 Foster St., Overland Park, Kansas, kicks off its 35th season with The Hallelujah Girls, a down-south comedy by Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten. The show is about six eccentric women in a small town in Georgia trying to turn an abandoned church into a day spa. Richard Karn, co-star of TV’s “Home Improvement,” plays — you guessed it — a contractor/handyman helping to renovate the old church. The show runs Sept. 10-Nov. 15.
The rest of the season:
Always, Patsy Cline, a perennially popular play by Ted Swindley utilizing the songs made famous by country-music legend Patsy Cline. Starring New Theatre favorite Cathy Barnett. The show runs Nov. 19 through Jan. 31, 2027.
Boeing, Boeing, a farce by Marc Camoletti about a bachelor juggling relationships with three flight attendants, all of whom converge on his apartment at the same time. The production’s guest star will be French Stewart (3rd Rock From the Sun). The show runs Feb. 3-April 11, 2027.
Remember Me, a comedy by Sam Bobrick about a midlife couple with a “happy but tired marriage” whose serenity is disrupted when an old college boyfriend suddenly appears. Linda Purl (Happy Days) and Patrick Duffy (Dallas) star. The show runs April 14-June 27, 2027.
Mean Girls, the musical, based on the 2004 movie, is a rock musical with a book by Tina Fey, lyrics by Nell Benjamin and music by Jeff Richmond. The show opened on Broadway in 2018 and ran almost two years. The New Theatre production is slated to run July 1-Sept. 5, 2027.
More info: www.newtheatre.com/913-649-7469.
KC Melting Pot Theatre, which declares itself to be “Kansas City’s cultural home for transformative Black theatre,” has prepared a four-show season:
Jitney by August Wilson, Sept. 17-26, is part of Wilson’s cycle of plays about Black life in America in each decade of the 20th century. This one depicts a an unlicensed cab company operating in the Hill District of Pittsburgh.
Livin’ Fat by Judi Ann Mason, Dec. 3-12. The play’s publisher, Samuel French, describes it as “a ’70s sitcom for the stage wherein a poor family in the ‘Black quarters’ of a Southern town comes across a sudden windfall.”
Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage, March 11-20, 2027. Set in New York in 1930, the play depicts a group of people during the Harlem Renaissance who have begun feeling the effects of the Great Depression.
God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, June 10-19, 2027. Like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in KCMPT’s previous season, God of Carnage was not written specifically about African-American characters. It’s a a study of how easily civilized veneers can be stripped away.
More info: www.kcmeltingpot.com/816-226-8087.
Spinning Tree Theatre, which was founded in 2010 by co-directors Andrew and Michael Grayman-Parkhurst, has prepared an ambitious season of musicals plus a classic tragedy by the Bard. The season:
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, with a book by Hugh Wheeler and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, Oct. 30-Nov. 8.
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, based on the iconic comic strip by Charles M. Schulz, with a book, music and lyrics by Clark Gesner (plus additional dialogue by Michael Mayer and additional music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa), Jan. 29-Feb. 7, 2027.
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (adapted by Doug Weaver), April 16-25, 2027.
The Secret Garden, based on the classic novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, with music by Lucy Simon and a book and lyrics by Marsha Norman, June 24-27, 2027. Spinning Tree Theatre performs at the Johnson County Arts & Heritage Center, 8788 Metcalf Avenue, Overland Park.
More info: www.spinningtreetheatre.com/913-379-6299.
The Coterie Theatre, the venerable young-audiences theater in Crown Center, has prepared:
Electric Poe, Sept. 14-Nov. 1, Union Hill Cemetery. Adapted by actor R.H. Wilhoit, this annual outdoor performance uses its cemetery setting to produce chills for family audiences.
The Pigeon Gets a Big Time Holiday Extravaganza, part of a rolling world premiere, Nov. 10-Dec. 31. Based on books and characters by Mo Willems. Script and lyrics by Mo Willems and Adam Tobin; music by Deborah Wicks La Puma.
Jacked! A Beanstalk Remix by Idris Goodwin is a trippy retelling of the old tale of Jack and the Beanstalk; it runs Jan. 27-Feb. 14, 2027.
The Gingerbread Kid, with music by Jodi Marr and a book and lyrics by Abe Reybold, depicts the adventures of a magical child who eats all the sweets prepared by the baking parents and runs away. The show runs March 22-May 2, 2027.
Madagascar: A Musical Adventure, based on the Dreamworks animated movie, June 8-Aug. 1, 2027. Music and lyrics by George Noriega and Joel Someillan, with a book by Kevin Del Aguila.
Electric Renaissance by Teresa Leggard, a co-production between the Coterie and the Blue Room in the 18th and Vine district, returns in spring 2027 (specific dates to be announced).
More info: 816-474-6552/www.thecoterie.org.
The White Theatre at the J on the Jewish Community Center campus, 5801 W, 115th St. in Overland Park, is officially a community theater that sometimes co-produces productions with professional companies.
Kansas City Actors Theatre, the venerable artist-led theater company that usually performs at City Stage
at Union Station, began its season in June.
The season continues with Eureka Day, a comedy by Jonathan Spector, which runs Sept. 9-27. The show depicts the board of directors at a day school reacting to a mumps outbreak. The cast includes John Rensenhouse, Erika Crane Ricketts and Cinnamon Schultz.
The KCAT season concludes with George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man with veteran actress Jan Rogge and a supporting cast to be announced. The play was adapted by company member Jerry Mañan. Rensenhouse will direct. The show runs Jan. 27-Feb. 14, 2027, at the Frantze Family Black Box Theatre at Avila University’s Goppert Performing Arts Center. The university is at 11901 Wornall Road.
More info: 816-361-5228/www.kcactors.org.
Starlight Theatre in Swope Park concludes its 2026 Broadway season with its own production of Disney’s Newsies, Sept. 8-13, followed by a touring company of Beetlejuice, Oct. 2-4.
More info: 816-363-7827/tickets.kcstarlight.com.
Phoenix Arts, a resident theater company based at the Arts Asylum, 824 E. Meyer, will present composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Last Five Years. The show runs Oct. 16-24. Brown is best known for the musicals Parade, The Bridges of Madison County and 13. This show charts a five-year relationship between a rising novelist and a struggling actress.
More info: theartsasylum.org.
Theatre for Young America, which performs at Union Station, had not announced its 2026-27 season at press time.
More info: 816-460-2093/www.tya.org.
